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Tech Skills Wanted? Mentors Needed.

What's the secret to teaching web development to young people during a
week-long DevCamp? For Nate Stone, Program Coordinator for the ideaLAB,
Denver Public Library's makerspace in the Community Technology Center,
the key doesn't seem to be fast computers or even fun.

The key is mentors. This isn't,
really, a surprise. When you learn from someone who has experience in
the field, you hear answers to important questions like, how will I use
what I'm learning? How can I find help when I get stuck? And other
questions, such as, would I be welcome working in this field? By
recruiting a diverse group of mentors, DevCamp was able to serve a
diverse group of students.

That's a real concern,
considering that at tech companies as prominent as Facebook
and Apple,
workers are mainly male and white. So as Nate was planning to expand
their DevCamp in its second year, he worked to make their program more
diverse. He connected with a couple neighborhood schools that had
reported low graduation rates and with library staff who worked at
branches in those neighborhoods to invite tweens and teens for whom
DevCamp might be a rare opportunity to get ahead.

DevCamp, which teaches HTML, CSS
and JavaScript in one compressed week of four-hour sessions, isn't
designed to turn first-time programmers into fully fledged front-end
developers. But they do work on real web projects; where this year they
created websites that addressed issues in their communities, the plan
next year is to build a mini-site for a local non-profit. Programs like
DevCamp are a great example of libraries responding to and serving their
communities.

Nathan Swartzendruber, SWON
Technology Educator

Hear Nate Stone talk about DevCamp

At the next Innovation
Conversation, November 12, Nate Stone will share the story of
DevCamp. Now planning for its third year, Nate has lots of details to
share about how DevCamp grew out of patron requests to become a
continuing program.

Want to know more about how he
recruited mentors for the program? Or how much computer programming he
needed to lead the DevCamp? There will be time to ask those questions
and plenty of others during the conversation.